Each service has its own doctrine and/or strategy — most recently the army in 2004, the navy in 2009 (remarkably, it is not available online), and the air force in 2012 (the official link is — perhaps aptly — perpetually broken, but you can get it here) — but these are of limited use, not least because they’re not written in close coordination with other services or with a coherent national military strategy in mind. So most analyses depend on secondary texts, occasional statements by serving officers, and writing by retirees. …

Navy

The Indian navy is deservedly receiving increasing attention. Harsh Pant’s edited volume The Rise of the Indian Navy (2012) has some valuable essays in it, especially Ladwig’s careful parsing of the fleet. James Holmes, Andrew Winner, and Toshi Yoshihara’s Indian Naval Strategy in the Twenty-first Century(2009) is a very useful single-volume survey. Ladwig’s “India and Military Power Projection” (2010) is an article-length stock-take of capabilities, though much has changed in the last five years. Of the recent crop of writing, Iskander Rehman has written a wide-ranging report for Carnegie on naval nuclear dynamics in the Indian Ocean, and a shorter piece for The National Interest on weaknesses in Indian anti-submarine warfare, both excellent. Frank O’Donnell and Yogesh Joshi have also written for Survivalon India’s SSBN force. …

For shorter reads, see Narang’s provocative essay in the Washington Quarterly (2013) on five myths about India’s nuclear posture, Gaurav Kampani’s concise overview in Strategic Asia 2013-14, and Hans Kristensen’s warning (2013) that India is surpassing minimum deterrence. The former head of India’s Strategic Forces Command (SFC) and present director of the Centre for Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS), B.S. Nagal, has written a series of pieces for India’s Force magazine (in June and October 2014, unfortunately pay-walled), with some radical arguments. Another former SFC commander, Vijay Shankar, has also written and spoken on this subject. Bharat Karnad’s idiosyncratic India’s Nuclear Policy (2008) is worth a look, as is Rajesh Basrur’s Minimum Deterrence and India’s Nuclear Security (2006) and Scott Sagan’s chapter on the evolution of India’s nuclear doctrine, in his own edited volume Inside Nuclear South Asia (2009).